OMPI publie des statistiques internationales sur les brevets 2006

Together, these five offices (US, JP, EP, KR, CN) accounted for 75% of all patents filed and 74% of patents granted worldwide in 2004, the last year for which complete statistics are available.

Gurry said that the growth in filings from Korea and China also has implications for how offices search prior art in non-European languages. Around one quarter of patent applications are now written in Japanese, Chinese or Korean. […]

In just 20 years, China has become the fifth largest patent office in the world, measured by the number of patent applications filed. Patent filings by Chinese residents grew more than five-fold between 1995 and 2004 to reach 65,786. Korea is now the fourth largest patent office, with patent filings by residents growing threefold between 1994 and 2004.